Creating goals based on an event category and event action

If using the format suggested in the Event Tracking we would have following event tracked:

_paq.push(['trackEvent', 'Documentary', 'Play', 'Thrive']);

In this instance the category would be ‘Documentary’ and the action would be ‘Play’. Presumably we would have other categories such as ‘Action’ and ‘Thriller’.

If we wanted to create a goal in the UI such as ‘User watches a documentary’ how would we do so? We can only trigger a goal when either an event name, category or action is sent but not a combination of these parameters. If we therefore tracked all ‘Play’ actions the goal would trigger even if the event category was not documentary.

Is it possible to trigger a goal where the event category would be ‘Documentary’ and the action would be ‘Play’?

If this is not possible do we have any other ways of achieving this without doing the following:

  1. Using trackGoal within our code, which we wanted to avoid as we did not want to have goals within our source code.

  2. Using a unique name for the event action or event name? I.e. our category would be ‘Documentary’ and our action would be ‘Documentary watched’. This seems like there would be a lot of duplication.

Perhaps my understanding of how goals worked is incorrect, any suggestions welcome. Thanks.

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This still seems to be the case in Matomo 4.5.0. When trying to base a goal on an event, you can only pick one of the three types of data related to an event, not all of them. To match on an action, we now need to make the action unique for the expected event. That removes the benefit of being able to correlate action names across categories.

It this just oversight, or is there a reason for this behaviour?

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